Posts by Jason Hindle

I can see this creating a new market

Airport laptop rental at the point of arrival. Choice of either Chromebook or something that comes with VirtualBox and the VMware player. Those (I assume many) of us who have a US employer will have a laptop waiting, either at the hotel, if visiting a client, or at the office if visiting the mothership. Getting the customer to store spare devices is also an option.

I don't see the point of ban. I don't see how it will make us more secure. A bomb is a bomb, and a relatively small bomb will take down a plane regardless of placement. However, I do think we'll all adapt and get on with it. No matter how onerous these regulations become, I predict a majority of us (perhaps fifty two percent) will continue to vote for morons.

Ahh, the elusive SIM card slot

Always so much jam tomorrow.

I guess he'd better call Saul....

Enough said.

Anyone criticising my auto correct errors

Can go to he'll.

Updated to it today....

Broke OneDrive....

The real problem?

Whoever is doing the interfering is doing so with apparent impunity. Someone (GCHQ? MI6? CIA?) needs to get a handle on this!

Edit: Oh, just had a look at some of the other comments. It seems El Reg is finally important enough to attract Putin-bots. How lovely!

Happy to be one of the forty eight percent

Who don't fall for this shit.

4Gb of RAM in a $999 laptop?

WTF?

Mine's the one with Chinese knock off written on it

Actually damned good for the money, at least for something to muck about with*. Reminds me of that car from Good Omens (the Wasab?).

* Core M Surface 4 look-a-like, newer processor, 8GB/256GB, half the price/twice the weight.

A win, win win, win election?

- May wins by a landslide and the country is no longer hostage to the Tory lunatic fringe: Win.

- While Corbyn is tested in the crucible of reality and found wanting: Win.

- Alternatively, a resurgent Liberal party blunts May (or even denies her an outright majority): Win.

- Alternatively, Labour extricates itself from its current, painful Yoga* position and actually achieves something: Win.

* Translated from the original Hindi, the technique translates, roughly, as the La La La I'm Not Listening posture, and involves the expert practitioner bending over backwards and inserting their head into their own bottom. The current Labour leadership are all experts at getting themselves into this position.

I hope they update the Storm

Had to do no end of hacking (engineering menus) just to get it to connect to a couple of data networks, in Africa, last year. These were situations where the Nexus and iPhone just worked. Reading around the issue, it looks Cyanogen related.

Great place to stick various VMs

And the odd Lightroom catalogue.

Is it too much to ask?

Just make a bloody PC that happens to run OSX (or whatever they're calling it this week). The current Mac Pro was actually reasonable(ish) value when it arrived, but given the direction Apple is going, I do wonder what the point is unless you're heavily dependent on Apple only applications.

Stunning

Especially the second video embedded into the article. I watched Rogue One over Christmas, and thought the Death Star was the real star of the film. Somehow made more real, and menacing than in the original film. That second video more impressive than Disney's special effects!

Sounds perfectly normal

As long as the guidance doesn't stretch to personal accounts (which should always come with the caveat "my views are my own").

Looks like the naval equivalent of a technical

One of those four by fours I see around Africa, from time to time, usually with a large gun mounted.

Yes, the Windows 10 updates are pretty awful

And it's even worse if you've not had the damned thing switched on for a while. I recently got back from a 12 week business trip, where there wasn't room in the hand luggage for the Surface. It took two days to get the damned thing right. It wouldn't even connect to my home WiFi, initially (fixed by manually configuring the IP settings). The Mac, OTOH (and I hate to write this*) just worked.

* Because everyone who owns a Mac knows they have problems of their own.

As the T-Shirt Says

It's not a cloud! It's someone else's computer*.

* And it can break.

Britain lost the core competency

To make its own submarines*, and it mostly boils down to the governments of Blair and then Brown**.

* And aircraft carriers, nuclear reactors and actual aircraft. Compared to the French, it all looks a tad pathetic.

** And I wrote that at someone who never voted for/kissed a sodding Tory BTW.

Well I like my Motorola 360

And I'm sad to see Android Wear hasn't been some sort of success. I guess it will have to join MSX computers and Olympus DSLRs* among many other failed things I've bet on over the years.

* Just the DSLRs though - since they started with the whole mirrorless thing, they seem quite a safe bet these days.

I'm a victim of the price hike....

It's not too much, but I'm a little disappointed. I like Lightroom, so could conceivably move to a perpetual licence (assuming Adobe still offer this). I like Photoshop, but rarely do much with it. I could, I suppose, move to something else*. OTOH, it's just a couple of extra quid each month.... I'll continue to ponder.

* Polite warning to any El Reg nerd who recommends GIMP: I have a very particular set of skills....

The Russian Stance is Understandable

The FSB will be wanting their asset back.

So is the customer being put on the correct price plan?

BT's ADSL2 product is cheaper than Infinity 2. I'm not normally litigious, but this might be a good enough reason to get all lawyerd up.

I normally try to be nice to the vegans

But even by vegan standards, I think the issue is more than a little overblown. The Unicorn vegan collective, in my neck of the woods, has even had to clarify that they absolutely will take the new five pound note. The really odd thing? They also have vegans in Australia, where they make all their notes the same way! Not so much of a fuss kicked up down under!

A lot depends on how much of a game changer 5G might be

But in the long term perhaps some sort of paying for how you watch OTT services might come into play. This could be driven either by the OTT services themselves, or by the network. From the network end, I've seen this on visits to Africa already. Consider Zimbabwe:

- I can buy a prepaid SIM card on arrival at Harare Airport, load this with some money, and buy a data package (typically USD 30 for 1Gb for one month - data is generally expensive in Africa).

- This is all well and good, but what cash strapped locals do is buy a smaller allowance, and then buy packages of unlimited services they want (typically unlimited WhatsApp, which is big in Africal, but also Facebook, Twitter).

In the longer term, I can see this trend happening with OTT services. Of course, if 5G radio brings us sufficiently close to wired, we might also see networks deciding they don't have to invest in a lot of expensive equipment for data metering, content billing and so on. I think the latter possibility is rather unlikely.

I'm starting to think that...

A lot of physicists, who never got invited to those sorts of parties, read El Reg.

Happy I upgraded a generation early

The latest MacBook pro didn't leave me at all disappointed with the decision. That said, my 2011 MacBook Air still runs fine, so the inability to upgrade the hardware has only been a minor problem for me. Come to think of it, the only reason I upgraded at all is really the retina display, for editing photos on the move, and extra memory (and oomph) when running more than one VM.

I honestly don't see any good choices when buying a new laptop at the moment. Windows 10 is still not, IMHO, a finished product. Apple has definitely lost its shine. Linux*, meanwhile, is not good for photo editing**.

* Did consider a workstation class laptop, running some flavour of Linux, for portable geekery.

** No, I'm not learning the atrocious bloody GIMP!

It's a sad day...

Presumably some of Russia's best engineering talent is on Linkedin?

So when it becomes self aware

It seems unlikely it will lead to Judgement Day, but it may well develop the personality of a snooty Parisian waiter who responds to all your attempts, at speaking French, in English.

So will this database be managed by BAAPS?

(British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons)

Upgraded my MacBook Pro a generation early

To hedge against price rises. To be fair to the price rises, they've not happened as quickly as I thought they would, which, worryingly, is probably a good indication I have the economic literacy of an average Brexitard....

It's showing little sign of recovery

Had the issue been purely algorithmic, I think the pound would be back up a little by now. Perhaps the algorithms were pretty well aligned with market sentiment?

Love the headlines on the strength of the FTSE, which the Brexiteers prefer to focus on (valued, of course, in a currency that is worth less than yesterday)...

Fu Who?

Now there's a name I've not heard in years. In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw a Fujitsu PC. That they're still in the market at all comes as a surprise....